


Rode You in the Dust

by impertinences



Category: RICE Anne - Works, The Mummy - Anne Rice
Genre: Abstract, Character Study, F/M, POV Second Person, Sentence Fragmented Style
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-23
Updated: 2016-07-23
Packaged: 2018-07-26 06:46:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 901
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7564273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/impertinences/pseuds/impertinences
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The skin across your left hand has not healed; you can see the bone, all the pink-dusk of your insides. Your ribs are as sharp as a scorpion, and you can sense them pressing against your side. You are not whole, have not been whole for eons.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rode You in the Dust

_Rode you in the dust._  
_Held your hand to the heavens, pulled your heart to the earth_  
_There was something that blinded me more than the mist_  
\- Widow’s Grove

 

You are Isis, complete once more, reborn into a body you remember. But where is your Osiris – where is your Lord? You think of him, and your hands are bloody. Inside you is a pyramid of mourning. There was a betrayal and a death, and Antony’s soul wrapped, briefly, fleetingly, around your heart. Your insides have been worn into husks ever since. Now, your breath is the fire of Ra and your voice the stir of a thousand scarab beetles. You weep, you claw, and your skin renews itself when, pliant, you sacrifice yourself to the sun’s healing rays.

Antony is war-scarred and incomplete. Traveling the Underworld, lost on Acheron, made of salt tears, with no payment for the ferry. The man beside you is not him. A shade, instead. A reflection of a God. Ramses, with his blue Aegean eyes and his unchanged nature.

You realize that he has made you the same: soulless.

While washing the sand from your skin, he says, “You and I shall be the only things that will not go to dust.”

 

 

 

 

You drink blood and honey, the food for the dead.

Ramses speaks to you in Latin, in Greek, and finally in your own tongue. It is a language that has, like you, been long dead. “You are no God here, my Queen. But you are not without life,” he murmurs, soft, somehow pained in a way you cannot understand.

He undoes your plaited hair, lets it gather loose and lustrous down your back. He removes the mixtures, the perfumes you would anoint your burial body with, and leaves the modern linen skirts. Silk stockings that crawl up your legs. Heels that draw attention to your defined calves. Large pearls for your ears, your neck.

(Once, you turned vinegar to wine with a pearl. Once, you charmed a Roman general by such antics.)

But you do not leave the house, do not leave the room. You hunger in a way you never have before. Nothing satisfies. You learn the era from your window, the language something you can mock and mimic. These are heavy words for your tongue and you dislike the taste of them. This century, as Ramses told, knows no loyalty or devotion. Religion has been replaced by science. You and what you once were do not belong.  
Below you, felines press themselves against the building, stretching their bodies. You can feel the snakes traveling beneath the streets, towards you. Sekhmet’s creatures and the only things still drawn to worship.

 

 

 

 

Your screams are a howling well within the night. Terrible and monstrous.

“Insatiable,” He says, knowingly, with a bitter smile.

You cannot take your fill from anything. The food is like sand in your mouth. The wine like water and the water as undesirable as stone. Even skin cannot appease you, though Ramses venerates you with a fervor that has never waned. But you are a waif within his bed, dusky skinned and easily conquered. A trait he never thought you were capable of possessing.

Laughing, you tell him that you are capable of many things now, and you try to tear apart his chest to see if his heart, like yours, no longer beats.

 

 

 

 

You feel nothing but a hunger you cannot satiate.

Or, perhaps, you feel everything, all of it much.

The skin across your left hand has not healed; you can see the bone, all the pink-dusk of your insides. Your ribs are as sharp as a scorpion, and you can sense them pressing against your side. You are not whole, have not been whole for eons.

You were a Goddess once. You roamed a region of sand like some prowling beast, conquering Romans the way one conquers shadows – with ease and swiftness. Your eyes like kohl and your skin gleaming, oiled to look like the sun. The way you used to dictate over philosophies and manuscripts. The way Antony brushed aside your hair and told you that yours was a warrior’s spirit. His heavy, soldier stature, pulling you inside and out. The abandon in which you loved.

Antony belongs with the desert.

Is apart of the desert now.

And you?

 

 

 

 

You are bitter, while you are incapable of adjusting to this world of mechanical beasts and black sea roads. Your body – that blackened, mummified, disfigured corpse Ramses had found in the museum – lacked too much. You were incomplete then, and so you are incomplete now, although your blood burns and your heat continues in a terrible rhythm. It’s the memories that frighten you. You cannot tell the sequence, the pattern. When you wake screaming, you can never remember having fallen asleep. You tear at your eyes. You see pyramids and Alexandria’s lighthouse burning, but someone is dressing you in pencil skirts and pearl-buttoned blouses. Someone is putting satin shoes on your feet as you witness war ships and the fall of an empire.

Sand for tears and poison in your mouth.

Ramses shakes you; he is immortal, unchanged, and his eyes are still blue with sorrow. The Pharaoh of lore, the one who gave you the elixir, returned you to a world you never knew, and now he’s horrified at what he has created.

The creature that is you.


End file.
